bonifartius 𒂼𒄄 @bonifartius@social.cleverlibre.org

There's a meme comparing the beauty of a random McDonald's worker to that of a fashion model. The idea behind it is that completely random, "mid" women can be so strikingly attractive that it calls into question the entire enterprise of 'high fashion'. I have to agree that life really is like that--some of the most beautiful women are encountered in paradoxically commonplace settings.

But on the internet it's a little bit different, I would argue. There is no "virtual McDonald's" where you can find pictures of the legendary mid woman. No matter where you go, every piece of online content is posted with some pretense, so any photo that's expressly meant to be a photo of a woman must necessarily lack the incidental aspect that makes the irl mid so beautiful. So in my experience, the prettiest women you can find on the internet come in two basic varieties: (a) people in the background of videos or pictures, like peasants or workers in an iPhone factory; and (b) the same haute couture models mentioned in paragraph #1. It's essentially an inversion of real life: while the physical world is known for beautiful mids, the digital is more suited to the two extremes, beautiful peasants and fashion models. Reality is middle while the internet is high-low.

The irony of the beautiful mid woman is that she's mid. The irony of the peasant is that she's doing hard labor and supposedly has no time or reason to look beautiful; and the irony of the fashion model is that she's part of an industry which is famously controlled by a cabal of male homosexuals who are allegedly indifferent to, or even contemptuous of, female sensuality. So what does this tell us, at the end of the day?

Kafka said that "written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts." There are some things that we cannot invoke with words, but which instead must always arise on their own, absent any external will. So it is with the mid woman, the peasant, and the fashion model. Capital-B Beauty, the real thing, will not arise when you command it to; it comes from a place where nobody is looking, and will find YOU before you find IT.

Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Strawberries $3,600
Utility $150

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

@bonifartius @josemanuel @adamgreenfield @ploum @f4grx
As a relative of hospital workers who suffered the pandemics, any vaccine conspiranoid can go fuck themselves far away from me. Period.

At first yall were like "We'll win when Facebook turns on ActivityPub"

Now you're you're all "Here's all the IP ranges to block so that the billions of Facebook users can't make use of activitypub"